Carrie Rickey

Shulman photographed buildings as if they were movie stars: He found their best angles and immortalized them.

As always, Freeman is a one-man charm offensive.

A naughtily funny, skin-deep satire.

Here, love and violence are random, everyone's a fool for love, and tomfoolery often has a shocking twist. And every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The resulting drama is more deeply felt than it is deep. But I can't think of another film so frankly dealing with what we expect from friendship, so tenderly showing how friends can fail in one area, yet be there in another.

Ramsay's child actors are nonprofessionals who can only express what they feel — which gives her film an unusual degree of emotional authenticity.

The overall tone of the film is sunny, with Ramona and Beezus resiliently turning life's lemons into lemonade.

For a movie loaded with ear-scorching profanity, oceans of booze, and illegal drugs enough to keep all of Cedar Rapids in high spirits for a month, there is something fundamentally decent about the film.

In its first half, Honeydripper trickles. In its second, it really flows.

While the film grows increasingly preposterous in its final act, the enigmatic performances of Youn and Jeon carry the day.

Like the Jerry Seinfeld documentary "Comedian," Conan offers a glimpse of the host's restlessness and creative process.

A gripping French-Algerian coproduction that makes Algeria's epic struggle for independence from France look like a gangster movie.

Startlingly original film.

During its two hours-plus running time, Field's movie veers from dark comedy to melodrama, not always gracefully. But tonal inconsistencies don't blunt the keenness of its satire, so sharp that I walked out with emotional razor burn.

It's indescribable fun.

Holds the audience captive and unusually vulnerable to psycho- and viscero-terror.

Encourages viewers to think outside the big box of super stores such as Wal-Mart.

It's an action movie that's also an intellectual-action flick.

Sparkle is a solid entertainment with a winning debut by Jordin Sparks in the title role.

What's frustrating for the viewer who wants to support the Jamaican economy is that "Life and Debt" does not suggest how Jamaica-lovers can help the island's citizens.

Its portrait of an artist hungry for experience is as timely today as when it was written.

The scenery is majestic, the goats adorable, the characters alternately gruff and tender. Like the best storytellers, Carion delays vital information about his characters that makes their dynamic increasingly interesting.

The three parallel love stories of daughter and dad, girlfriend and boyfriend, sister and brother, are nicely handled. Robinson is a sympathetic director of actors, allowing almost everyone their dignity. For the most part, she keeps this emotionally charged story in the schmaltz-free zone.

While on its face, Mother and Child is about the impact of adoption, in its heart Garcia's movie reckons how consequential motherhood is in the calculus of womanhood. The fine actors show how we bond to those not related to us by blood - and also how we love. Bring Kleenex.

If Martin Scorsese updated "The Roaring Twenties," the classic Jimmy Cagney movie about World War I vets who come home and find that the only jobs available are with gang lords and bootleggers, it would look a lot like Sean Kirkpatrick's rookie feature, Cost of a Soul.

Its surgical candor makes Forks Over Knives a little bit like a food horror movie.

Among the leads, Radcliffe alternates between playing the wet blanket and the dry wit, and Grint strikes a few sparks as his ambivalent protector. It is Watson who catches fire as the strategist and soldier of this penultimate Potter quest. Watson's so good that one wishes Rowling had built her septology around Hermione Potter.

What threatens to be 80 minutes of hypochondria turns into an inspired travelogue of nontraditional remedies. [13 June 1997, p.03]

With mixed results, Moore singles out those who profit from the misery of American workers.

Startlingly original comedy-drama.

It's wholesome as a glass of milk, and as refreshing.

A double shot of Saturday-night lowdown chased by a cheery chug of Sunday-morning uplift.

Subversively funny, Stick It sees gymnastics as a microcosm of teen life.

The treasure of the film is the unearthing of the family bond, magically played by Douglas and Wood.

The unforced performances of Courtney and Fanning are remarkable.

The movie about literature's luckiest orphan may teem with children, but it is not for them.

The trippy creation of onetime marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob is a cockeyed optimist toiling at the bottom of the fast-food chain.

DuVernay has confidence in her actors that is reciprocated in kind. Richardson-Whitfield gives a remarkably empathetic performance.

A disturbing and forceful drama.

Fraser and Elfman are goofily endearing even if they seem more sincere acting opposite the rabbit and the duck than they do each other.

So what if the movie isn't finger-lickin' good like the original? The performances by Hanks as a crook and Irma P. Hall as his honorable landlady are mighty tasty.

Fugard’s classic minimalist drama comes eloquently to film.

It is a difficult and demanding movie, one that rewards the persevering moviegoer just as Pollock's difficult and demanding paintings ultimately reward the steadfast.

Fan's fly-on-the-wall perspective enables the viewer to empathize with all the players in the family drama, unlikely to have a happy ending.

When the film focuses on the Trojans, it's splendid. But when Troy attempts to sort out the competing agendas of the Greeks, it drags.

Vintage Terry Gilliam, a pour not to all tastes but one certain to please lovers of "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

Sisterhood is Stand by Me for girls, as sullen, plucky, melodramatic, exuberant, athletic, graceless, crafty, artistic, arrogant, modest, helpless and resourceful as its teenage heroines.

The performances in Girl, Interrupted resonate, but the movie does not.

Richard Wenk's script, taut and enjoyable, pays homage to those police procedurals, with a nod to the Brazilian hostages-on-mass-transit documentary, "Bus 174."

With Insomnia, his third feature, Nolan, 32, has proven himself a precocious master of the thriller, unsettling the audience with a brief image of blood seeping through fabric.

For those who have seen Tarkovsky's moody original, let me say that Soderbergh skims the fat from the 1972 film. What's left is a rich stew of longing.

The sequences with the melancholy Faunia are monochromatic and those with Lester perfunctory. Benton too neatly -- and too hastily -- wraps up a story that would surely exert more power if it were messy and unrushed.

However improbable this sounds, The Brady Bunch Movie is to the original television show what real grass is to Astroturf. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

Shamelessly entertaining.

Plays like an exalted episode of "Miami Vice" or a stealth version of "Shane."

In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Kempner gives us a balance of artist and alter ego, introducing us to a woman we'd like to know even better.

If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."

Roos introduces the possibility that perhaps two partials add up to the whole truth, and in so doing creates a provocative love story that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

Ford plays Linus as a consummate actor so good at feigning emotions that he fools even himself. It is a nuanced performance, astonishing in an otherwise innocuous film. Though Ormond's Sabrina doesn't exactly generate the heat to melt Ford's glacial CEO, his transformation from polar ice cap to volcano is heartstopping. Who'da thunk we were watching Cinderfella? [15 Dec 1995, p.03]

McQueen finds the exquisite tension between the brother wanting to disconnect and the sister longing for connection. To paraphrase a line of Sissy's, it's a good movie that comes from a bad place.

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

Taylor-Wood stresses the universals rather than the specifics of John's youth. So don't go expecting a Fab Four origin story. The word Beatles is never uttered. But do go.

Goblet of Fire, fourth in the fantasy franchise, is the most fun and the most fraught with conflict.

Core, a cinematographer who helms both camera and directorial duties here, creates a vivid sense of time and place without letting the period music, clothes or art direction intrude. The performances are likewise understated and unpretentious, especially those of Wahlberg and Kinnear.

In describing the conflict of a woman who has it all without enjoying it all, Pearson's book had teeth. McKenna's screenplay has only a smile. But is it ever good to laugh.

Wrenching, poignant, and quietly healing.

Raunchy, raucous and riotously funny.

Jon Amiel's moody, and strangely moving, vignette of the naturalist is something else entirely. It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist.

Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas. His most gorgeous, too, with the peaches'n'strawberries'n'cream palette of early Technicolor films.

Worthy of mention is Carolina Herrera's design for Bella's wedding dress, sophisticated and demure in the front and Pippa Middleton sexy, and proper, in the back.

Involving study of sibling and interpersonal relationships.

To the extent that this mostly sunny excursion succeeds, it's due to the irrepressible Hawkins.

Some call Margot a comedy. For me, it is a tragedy impaled by comic moments.

For those who gripe that America doesn't make cars or movies like it used to, Clint Eastwood has two words for you: Gran Torino.

Whatever you say about Sex and Lucía, you have to admit that it takes place at a hormonal high tide that never ebbs.

While 13 Going on 30 is too formulaic to sustain the delicacy of emotion that gave "Big" its appeal, it has tour-de-farce moments that made screenwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa's "What Women Want" such a monster hit.

At first glance Walter isn't a guy you want to spend two hours with. But by the end of the film, you don't want to see him go. Jenkins is like that: He sneaks up on you and steals your heart with light-fingered skill.

Hugely entertaining catalog of MPAA follies.

A challenging film populated with characters who are depressed, on antidepressants, or strung out on mood-altering drugs, The Dead Girl is a downer with resonance.

Buoyed by the appealing Hart and Grenier.

Silva expertly maintains the tension, asking the audience to interpret Raquel's bizarro behavior. His diagnosis is a pleasant surprise.

Hate, love, bigotry, empathy and chance are the uninvited guests at Monster's Ball.

A perfectly lovely, if uninspired, movie that suffers from following on the trotters of "Babe," the one about the piglet advocate of barnyard brotherhood.

By turns rowdy and rueful, The Switch is a comedy with serious ramifications, not least of which is the question, what makes a family?

I was with the movie until its head-scratcher of an ending, too oblique for its own good.

All of the elements that made The Matrix a mass-cult phenom -- breathtaking physical gymnastics wedded to the brain-cramping mental and spiritual kind -- resurface in Reloaded.

At its best, Nanny McPhee Returns has the playful surrealism of "Babe," if "Babe" had been directed by Terry Gilliam.

The story hooks us because stars Helen Mirren and Julie Walters look as fetching in woolens and Wellingtons as they do in the altogether. But it reels us in because it is about people who for so long have paid lip service to making a difference that they are profoundly altered when they actually do.

All Muppet capers, whether they involve low comedy or high seas, require the romantic conflict of Kermit and Piggy. Fortunately, the frog and the pig are worth waiting for. And like all great thespians, they leave you wanting more. [16 Feb 1996, p.3]

Beautifully photographed by Crystel Fournier, Sciamma's film has a floaty weightlessness (as opposed to the heavyosity of "Boys Don't Cry") that neither judges nor pathologizes Laure.

A gut-punch of a movie, a potent, mesmerizing drama.

A jubilee for McDormand and jolly good fun for most everyone else.

The film is plush and passionate and graced with elegant performances. Best is that of Emma Thompson as Brideshead's matriarch, Lady Marchmain, who resembles a cross between Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict.

This furry family comedy about a boy and his border terrier is irresistible, if not exactly in the league of "Babe."

Despite its title, The Exploding Girl is an oddly tranquil experience.

Ranging in age from 30 to 96, the Berlevag men clearly enjoy being on camera and are unusually candid about their various pasts as Casanovas and hashish addicts.

At its best it is one of the most dynamic movies from a most dynamic filmmaker, now 76.